Kenneth S. Cohen, The Way of Qigong:

Alan Watts used to say that angels, like Daoist Immortals, can fly because they take themselves lightly!

Genevieve Harrison:

At the heart of Microsoft’s decision lies an uncomfortable truth about modern corporate governance: human lives have been reduced to variables in an optimization equation.

For those counting headcount reductions as merely statistics, remember this: Behind each of the 6,000 is a person who until yesterday believed they were valued members of one of the world’s most successful companies. People with families, mortgages, healthcare needs, and career aspirations.

The question that should haunt every corporate boardroom but rarely does: If a company at the pinnacle of capitalism, with virtually unlimited resources, treats human capital as its most dispensable asset, what hope exists for workers across the broader economy?

As one employee, a 14-year Microsoft veteran, posted on LinkedIn after receiving notice: “I helped build systems I was told would make all our jobs better. Instead, they made my job irrelevant.”

The algorithm of sacrifice demands efficiency above all else. And in the church of shareholder value, human capital has become the preferred offering.

Charles Eisenstein:

Lord knows I tried long and hard to make the case for peace, going back a decade. … But now we are at a point where those who call for peace are branded by each side as an agent of the other.

That also is the point where miracles are necessary. What is a miracle? It is a happening that is impossible from within a current story, but possible from a new one. Therefore, not only does it seem impossible, but by happening anyway it invites us to question what else we have assumed that may not be true. That is the state of unknowing, the release of old beliefs and what we thought we knew, that prepares the soil for the miraculous in the first place.

Hamilton Nolan:

If you need a cause, if you need a purpose, if you need a crusade that will do the most to produce the world you want, it is this: Class war. The same damn class war! Taking wealth away from the rich and giving that wealth to the less rich. Our democracy, such as it is, will never, ever be stabilized until that happens. Do not allow yourself to be hypnotized by the myriad results of the rich having too much money. Keep your mind instead on the problem itself. The rich are too rich.

A proverb is one man’s wit and all men’s wisdom.

Lord John Russell, as quoted by Jackson Crawford in this (as always) excellent video “Odin and Wisdom.”

Josh Radnor: Give up on your war against reality

When I fight reality, when I wail and moan that things should be going ‘some other way,’ I suffer. When I begin with acceptance and surrender – “Okay this is what is happening right now and where we are” – I don’t suffer. Or at least I suffer far less. And the next right actions are much much clearer than when I’m giving equal weight to each voice in my head.

This, from Alan Jacobs, is one of the most clarifying things I’ve read in a while.

1. In the current regime, what persons or groups are most harmed or most likely to be harmed?
2. Where can I find those vulnerable people in my community?
3. What organizations serve and seek to protect those people?
4. How can I (placed as I am, with certain specific gifts and resources) assist those organizations?

Once I have answered those questions, I have a plan for meaningful political action.

Charles Eisenstein: “Economic growth is finding something people used to do for themselves, taking it away and selling it back to them.”

Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine:

In 1589, William Lee of Calverton developed one of history’s most quietly revolutionary technologies. The legend goes that Lee was upset that his wife spent more time knitting than with him, so he devised the stocking frame to speed up the process. Lee’s machine, about the size of a large desk, allowed its operator to use pedals and bars to automatically mimic the movements of a hand knitter, making it much easier, and faster, to produce stock-ings, socks, tights, and other knit garments. (At the time, men wore tights, not pants.)

The machine worked so well that he tried to commercialize it. But Queen Elizabeth refused to grant Lee a patent, and left him with a foreboding rebuttal: “You aim high, Master Lee,” she said, before expressing concern for the hand knitters his device would affect. “Consider… what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.” Lee died broke, oblivious that he’d sowed some of the earliest seeds of the Industrial Revolution. His brother James Lee pressed on with his invention, however, and it later became a key tool in England’s booming textile industry.

At our point in the timeline it’s virtually inconceivable that someone in authority would stop some new automation because of the harm it would do workers. We all look on helplessly because we know our tech overlords are unleashing destructive forces and we know no one in power will stop them because the economy must grow at all costs.